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orgulous: msg#00013

culture.language.word-of-the-day

Subject: orgulous

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Do you march to the beat of a different drummer? Discover
where this term came from in our Dictionary of Allusions.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?allusion.htm&6
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The Word of the Day for March 14 is:

orgulous \OR-gyuh-luss\ adjective
: proud

Example sentence:
Antoine usually worked with the boutique's most elite
clientele and tended to adopt an orgulous air toward
more "ordinary" customers.

Did you know?
"From Isles of Greece / The princes orgulous, their high
blood chafed, / Have . . . sent their ships . . . / To ransack
Troy. . . ." Thus Shakespeare began the story of the haughty
princes and their revenge for the abduction of Helen in _Troilus
and Cressida_, employing a colorful word first adopted in the
13th century from Anglo-French "orguillus." After the Bard's
day, "orgulous" dropped from sight for 200 years; there is no
record of its use until it was rejuvenated by the pens of Robert
Southey and Sir Walter Scott in the early 1800s. Twentieth-
century novelists and journalists (including James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf) continued its renaissance, and today "orgulous"
is an elegant choice for proud writers everywhere.





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